I’m struggling today to figure out what to write about. I’m in a mode of life drawing where I’m studying and working daily but I don’t have any particular goals that I’m working towards at the moment. I’m just enjoying being an artist and trying to improve my skills.
Warmup page with some anatomy terms review.
I’m constantly thinking about the form in space now and I’m very conscious about how I apply my strokes to the drawing. It’s very easy to quickly shade an area with straight strokes all in one direction but this will flatten the form, so now I try to think about the body in simple shapes and shade so that the form is described better. You can see the difference in this drawing as the leg and chest in shadow looks flat due to the straight line shading.
Not sure what happened with this drawing but I’m not very happy with it.
Here I am focusing on proportion. Especially with a standing pose it’s easy to have the proportion way off by the time you get to the feet. And the way to fix that is by measuring, a lot. It may seem tedious but when doing a longer drawing, such as 3 hours long, spending the first 30 minutes getting all the proportion down correctly will make the rest of the time much more enjoyable rather than full of fixing errors that started in the first 5 minutes.
For the last drawing I felt like painting a bit. Yes this is painting, the medium doesn’t matter. When you paint you think in form and planes rather than line. I’m using the side of a Conte crayon stick to shade in areas quickly and establish tone. Working like this can be fun but I didn’t really care for all the charcoal mess that it made.